


Possibility

by Miri Cleo (miri_cleo)



Category: The Scar - China Miéville
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 17:00:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/600068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miri_cleo/pseuds/Miri%20Cleo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bellis finally addressed her possibility letter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Possibility

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SpiceBerry](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpiceBerry/gifts).



It was there before her, concrete. And she had always kept it, knowing this day would come. But she had stopped anticipating it long ago. There had been storms. There had been pirates and bribes and moments of desperation that seemed to push at her with a dull sort of insistence. But she had not allowed herself to feel them too acutely. As she stared at the paper in her hands, her feelings still were muted.

She did not open the letter. Instead, she stared at the neatly folded pages. They seemed slightly weathered, and that was not her imagination. Her possible letter. The day she finished it was the day she saw New Crobuzon again, and thought it remained sealed with carefully dripped wax, it never left her thoughts.

It was not the same city, or so she had thought that day. But it did not take long. It did not take long at all to realize that it was she who had changed. Bellis had known that all along. She did not go back to Salacus Fields, though she was no longer afraid to. She did not feel like she was afraid of anything anymore. And that was a place of her past; she knew nothing would be there, no one would be there for her. Whatever had happened, and she would only hear the slightest rumors, half memories of what it might have been, it was long over. There were new threats to deal with. There were new conspiracies, new grand plans.

Though, somewhere else, Bellis (or perhaps nigh Bellis) was dead and forgotten, perhaps before that death. She was a memory, a casualty of the Scar. Or perhaps they had not met death there. Perhaps they had fallen in and come out somewhere else, as…something else. And like the avanc they were pulled from one world to another to serve some purpose until they could serve no more. Or they were dead, as Hedrigal had said. She had become content to believe either. Some Bellis might be stuck in the currantless waters, slowly wasting away.

It was fair to say that she thought very little of it all, now. New Crobuzon was a possibility city, and it changed as she did. It would change with our without her. There was the disappearance of the constructs; there were the street magicians, making their golems once in a while. Sometimes she found herself standing underneath the ribs, staring up at them as if daring them to challenge her presence. Sometimes she woke in the middle of the night after dreaming about a possibility, about staring transfixed at something monstrous, as if it really might have happened. 

There was a Bellis who took Uther Doul into her bed, a Bellis who had felt the curves of his muscles. She had tasted his sweat and his lips. She had felt his warm cheek against her bare chest. It was a possibility among other possibilities. And now that her anger had turned cold, her thoughts rarely turned to that possibility. Surely he had considered it as well. But…perhaps he had not. It was not necessary for what he needed from her. She had willingly played her part without that, though she had been waiting. And he denied himself what he, perhaps, wanted. He denied himself for reasons she could not pretend to understand. But it did not sting.

She remembered the day the avanc stopped. It took more than a day, really. It took longer for them to stop, to catch up to the great, dead beast. They all knew it, and there was a stillness about Armada. Without a word of acknowledgement, they all mourned. They mourned the adventure, the great experiment. They mourned the invisible beast so far below. All of that, those around Bellis began to realize, was gone. And they mourned it, no matter the cost.

As soon as she had noticed it, it was gone. The great floating city would always push forward, just as she pushed forward. She did not try to follow the work to unchain themselves from it. It was a great undertaking, perhaps one of the last she had truly seen where the floating city was truly one. It was a moment of glory, to untether themselves from their almost folly. She remembered lying awake, thinking of the creature as it sank and sank. Perhaps it was still sinking now, into the world from which it had come. And once it arrived there, what then?

She broke the seal. The letter, started so long ago, was addressed to herself. To Bellish. And she did not read it as Bellis. The woman who wrote to her was unscarred. That Bellis had reached her destination in some nigh-world. And that thought made her feel lost. If only she had found Isaac when she returned; perhaps some version of her had looked for him. Perhaps some version of her had never parted ways with him and had never understood what it was he grasped at so fanatically. 

But she knew, as she stacked page after page, that she had experienced all of these things, no matter who had emerged from them. World or nigh world, she moved in it now knowing not only that every choice she made not only had a consequence but a nigh-choice.. 

The scars that marked her told her what choice Bellis had made. And New Crobuzon had swallowed her willingly, and in turn, she swallowed it, letting it form her anew. And sometimes, she could see it as a kind of sea, in its ebb and flow, in the way it swelled around her. But she did not long for the sea. And her journey was as distant as it was fresh. The words were cold—just one possibility among so many, among enough possibilities to drive one mad. 

It was a mad, mad story. But this was a place for stories. She folded it neatly, sealed it again with wax. But what she knew was that she—night or not—was not mad.


End file.
